Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I used to know how to write in Japanese

aethermug.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 277 posts

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#131

Post by BlarfMcFlarf »

GaggiX wrote: post #53

That's why I focus on learning words rather than individual kanji characters. Kanji characters have so many different readings, and the Japanese language is full of exceptions that it's not worth the time unless you're passionate about it, eventually you will pick up the readings of most common ones and you will be able to guess new words automatically, writing them no thank you, I barely write in my own language wit…

I tried this, but I couldn’t really tell the differences between even quite obvious characters until I sat down with them individually.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#132

Post by e4325f »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #124

"is point is that learning kanji presents two obstacles: remembering what the shapes mean and remembering how they are pronounced." How is this different from English words? How is conscientiousness pronounced? Not to mention rendezvous.

Words in English are built from characters we can pronounce individually and this extends to words so whilst you might not get it perfect you can at least guess the sound of an English word. This isn't the case for characters in Mandarin or Japanese, no sound is encoded in the strokes, the equivalent of a character.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#133

Post by leelin »

Years ago I asked my teacher what percent of street merchants or high school kids would know how to write some of the more complicated, uncommon characters from the advanced textbooks. She replied street merchants maybe 50%, but high school students 100% -- during high school every student will be at their lifetime peak literacy, because they will be cramming and memorizing how to write every possible character in preparation for the college entrance exams.

I tell locals I can "speak, read, and type", but only have 1st grade writing abilities in Mandarin. The key is typing -- you can chat on Line, WeChat, email, or any mobile apps to accomplish day-to-day tasks. But the typing is phoenetic either via Roman pinyin, zhuyin, romaji, etc.

So yes, this problem only comes up in languages where drawing the characters are mostly independent of the pronunciation. You don't need to type individual words, you can type phrases and the input tool presents choices sorted by most commonly used. Therefore, even sending communication is closer to a reading exercise rather than a writing exercise.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#135

Post by numpad0 »

latentsea wrote: post #125
timr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemmi…

It's all solvable. Korean did it. Koreans are fine. For verbs you could just replace the kanji with katakana so that you still get the pattern recognition of okurigana as a visual aide. They just don't want to do it, because they don't like to change. A generation educated under a new system wouldn't have difficulty using it. They would however lose access to an abundance of cultural artefacts which play a central ro…

Koreans don't seem entirely fine to me, but besides, Japanese pronunciation is actually more aggressively simplified than the other two CJK languages during Edo era that numbers of homophone is out of control.

There are as many as 50 homophones for koushou due to this, for example[1]. Communication by phonetic transcripts alone just isn't going to work.

1: https://togetter.com/li/2380657?page=2

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#136

Post by wizzwizz4 »

timr wrote: post #94
astrobe_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, that's exactly what you do when you read English - and many of us even read it as a foreign language with different roots and different grammar etc. So I don't understand how it would be more tedious in hiragana; it looks like a "just get used to it" thing to me.

No you don’t. There’s actually a lot of research showing that native English speakers don’t read letters, they read word shapes. And people who read fastest read in even larger groups of words, to the point of eliding segments of sentences or paragraphs entirely. Chunking is incredibly important for reading speed, and reading hiragana is much closer to reading letters than words. My reading speed in Japanese is nowhe…

> native English speakers don’t read letters, they read word shapes.

Don't try to teach children to read this way, though: it's a high-level technique that comes with practice and familiarity, with near-instant fallback to lower-level techniques as appropriate, or the resort of dyslexics who cannot read any other way. Teaching children to use the approaches used by struggling readers will tend to produce more struggling readers than necessary.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#137

Post by mytailorisrich »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #124

"is point is that learning kanji presents two obstacles: remembering what the shapes mean and remembering how they are pronounced." How is this different from English words? How is conscientiousness pronounced? Not to mention rendezvous.

English is written using an alphabet. Alphabets are by and large phonetic so you do not need to remember how to pronounce every word, you learn to read the alphabet and specific spelling (e.g. 'th' in English) and you are mostly done.

Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#138

Post by latentsea »

numpad0 wrote: post #135
latentsea wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all solvable. Korean did it. Koreans are fine. For verbs you could just replace the kanji with katakana so that you still get the pattern recognition of okurigana as a visual aide. They just don't want to do it, because they don't like to change. A generation educated under a new system wouldn't have difficulty using it. They would however lose access to an abundance of cultural artefacts which play a central ro…

Koreans don't seem entirely fine to me, but besides, Japanese pronunciation is actually more aggressively simplified than the other two CJK languages during Edo era that numbers of homophone is out of control. There are as many as 50 homophones for koushou due to this, for example[1]. Communication by phonetic transcripts alone just isn't going to work. 1: https://togetter.com/li/2380657?page=2

Guess Japanese people just can't talk to one another without subtitles.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#139

Post by numpad0 »

latentsea wrote: post #138
numpad0 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Koreans don't seem entirely fine to me, but besides, Japanese pronunciation is actually more aggressively simplified than the other two CJK languages during Edo era that numbers of homophone is out of control. There are as many as 50 homophones for koushou due to this, for example[1]. Communication by phonetic transcripts alone just isn't going to work. 1: https://togetter.com/li/2380657?page=2

Guess Japanese people just can't talk to one another without subtitles.

Or there could be cues not captured well in the script. I don't know. But the rightmost column is real.

1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%93%E3%81%86%E3%81%97%E...

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#140

Post by makeitdouble »

This is a fascinating subject, that would merit some input from other languages IMHO.

> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.

In alphabetic languages with separate pronounciation (French, English etc.) people forget spelling instead. And of course we recognize spellings we know, even if we couldn't recall it cold from memory.

Another point: the article defines kanji as images, but each character can be parsed as a composition of base blocks (radicals), and people primarily remember those. Put in computer terms, kanji are not bitmaps but overlayed vectorial blocks. That I think makes a world of difference for how we handle them, foreigner and native alike.

Post reply on HN